Читать книгу Sex and the Stranger 2: A Mischief Erotica Collection - Justine Elyot, Victoria Blisse, Giselle Renarde - Страница 7

The sun takes its time to set over the Pacific. Particularly when viewed from Nepenthe, the fabled new-age restaurant high on the promontory in the middle of the Big Sur. Up there, where you can see rows and rows of rugged cliffs running north to Monterey and south to Don’t-Even-Want-To-Know-Where, time stretches both ways, too.

Or maybe it’s just the legacy of five decades of well-heeled Californian weekend hippies.

Four of them had driven me up that afternoon in the beat-up maintenance truck from Esalen Retreat Center further south, where we were all working the grounds and kitchen by day in order to finance exploring our spirituality at night. They were lovely boys, really. Maybe some other time …

Right now, I was waiting for someone very different.

‘Be careful,’ the guys said, ‘he’s a stranger.’ And drove off.

Yes, yes, I thought. And you were strangers too, three weeks ago.

Ever since I had announced my plans to travel around the world by myself, back in London, many months back, disapproving voices popped up everywhere, warning me about the perils of strangers.

And those were the people who thought I was just travelling.

I can’t imagine what they would have said if they knew that the main purpose of this journey was to find love. Lovers. Lovers all over the globe.

Sometimes, when the voices insisted, I got fed up enough to present them with the statistics. ‘The most dangerous man you will ever meet is the man you live with’, I said. They didn’t hear me.

By the time I was waiting on the terrace at Nepenthe, suffused with vermilion shadows from the huge sun spilling its light all the way from Japan, I had had quite a bit of experience with strangers.

And with lovers, too.